The Red Line: The Gripping Story of the RAF’s Bloodiest Raid on Hitler’s Germany. John Nichol
criticism of the campaign, both in the press and within the Air Ministry, started to mount, Harris remained defiant. His critics claimed there was no sign of deterioration in the mood or morale of the German public. They remained ‘apathetic’ about the bombing of their towns and cities. On 25 February, in a combative internal memo, Harris challenged his critics in typically robust fashion, giving those around him no doubt that his faith in the heavy bombing of German cities securing an Allied victory was as robust as ever. If anything, he was even more determined to intensify the attacks. Under the heading ‘Reactions of German Morale to the Bomber Offensive as described in official documents and the Press’, he wrote:
1. I have the honour to refer to numerous accounts now current both in official documents and in the public Press on the reactions of German morale in heavily attacked areas to the Combined Bomber Offensive and to state my conviction that these reports seriously misrepresent the state of mind of the German populace at the present time.
2. I understand that incontestable evidence derived from Most Secret sources exists to show that the continuance and probable intensification of the Offensive is regarded in the highest Nazi circles as something which, in the absence of unpredictable errors by the Allies, will certainly ensure a German defeat comparatively quickly by producing a collapse of morale as well as production on the Home Front.
3. To my mind this belief, which is certainly confirmed by the efforts of the German propaganda machine to divert our bombing by any means from industrial targets in Germany and to convince the Germans that these efforts will shortly be successful, is inconsistent with the widely and officially disseminated view that the prevalent attitude to bombing in Germany is ‘apathy’…
4…This view is manifestly false…There have been a vast number of indications that the attitude of the German population to the bombing, so far from being apathetic, is one of the utmost despair, of terror and of panic not always held in control by the authorities.
5. It is a depressing fact that this slogan as to the “apathetic” reaction of the German population should receive as it does the widest publicity in official documents and statements, whereas any impartial interpretation of the mass of information coming out of Germany, if it was properly weighed up, would inevitably show a condition of affairs such as I have outlined above and certainly no condition of ‘apathy’. 13
Despite his convictions, the brutal losses of that winter caused a change in attitude within the Air Ministry. The faith they had shown in Harris and his Combined Bomber Offensive was starting to waver. Harris was handed a new list of targets, centres of industry rather than of symbolic significance – Schweinfurt, Leipzig, Brunswick, Regensburg, Gotha and Augsburg – that should assume priority over any others. However, his obstinacy remained: there would be no immediate raids on any of the targets suggested to him. Harris still believed that his main offensive would bring the victory he had promised, even if the date by which he had predicted ‘a state of devastation in which surrender was inevitable’ was rapidly approaching.
The raids continued on his favoured targets – the largest so far on Stuttgart, with 116 sorties. On their return, Thomas Maxwell, an 18-year-old rear gunner on his sixth mission with 622 Squadron, was forced to bale out after his Lancaster was hit by enemy fire. He feared the flames would start licking at his turret, the most cramped and claustrophobic part of the plane, with only a Perspex shield between him and the 20,000-foot abyss below him. Like all rear gunners, he had to crawl into his ‘cold hole’, where there was so little room to turn that another crew member had to shut the doors behind him.
‘I didn’t have time to exit by the main door. I had to get my wits together quickly. First I needed a parachute. It was in the fuselage, an arm’s length away. So I opened the turret doors and hoped they didn’t jam. Then I dragged the ’chute carefully into the turret in case it deployed. Then I rotated the turret 90 degrees, otherwise I’d have baled out into the fuselage. But there was no room to put the ’chute on! With the turret now at right angles to the fuselage, the slipstream gale was grabbing, tearing and tugging at the flapping parachute backpack, the spewing fuel whipping past me. There was nothing now but Hobson’s Choice: go back into the pitch-black fuselage or stick your rear end into this growling 120-knot wind.’14
Thomas managed to clip one parachute hook on, but as he was contorting his body to fasten the other he fell backwards into the night, his parachute under his left arm. ‘I pulled the rip cord: Long John Silver managed with one hook, and one was better than none. Life is simplified when there are no options. There was a crunch as the drag-chute came out and the parachute woofed into its canopy above.’
Somehow, falling through the sky from 8,000 feet, Thomas managed to attach the other hook and within a few seconds was floating securely down to the ground. ‘There was just a bit of moonlight now, and instead of landing on the spire of some French parish church, or drowning in somebody’s swimming pool, I was dumped unceremoniously into a ploughed field and a relatively soft landing. The field was full of piles of manure. There is a saying: “It matters not whether you’re in the s**t or out of it, it’s only the depth that varies.” At this point, I was quite happy to be in it.’
Following Stuttgart there were two huge raids on Frankfurt, and a final onslaught on Berlin on 24 March, during which the weather forecast proved inaccurate once again. Chick Chandler had a ring-side seat once more. ‘By some dreadful mistake we arrived early over Berlin. The rear gunner said we had no option but to circle. Circle over Berlin! What a disaster! We were only at 13,000 feet, so we had a bird’s eye view of the whole thing. We saw at least four Pathfinder bombers blow up as they were going round. Seeing all those aircraft going down made me realise what we were doing. Although I was the baby of the crew, I knew just what the dangers were, and how easy it was to be shot down and killed.’
Strong winds had scattered the stream across a wide area and pushed many of them towards heavy flak defences they would otherwise have missed. Seventy-three aircraft were lost, an estimated 50 from flak. It was another bad night for Bomber Command.
By 30 March the Battle of Berlin was about to end, but Harris was determined to make one last attempt to score his decisive, symbolic victory. ‘Yet, the March that had entered like a lamb was destined to go out like the proverbial lion. The ill-wind of death had still to be sated.’15
Ron Auckland
The average member of a Bomber Command crew had a 30 per cent chance of being killed before they completed their first 30-op tour. Of a total of 125,000 aircrew, 55,573 were killed: an overall death rate of 44.4 per cent; another 8,400 were wounded and some 10,000 taken prisoner. In no other branch of the armed forces were the chances of dying so high, or the combatants called into action night after gruelling night. Yet every one of the 125,000 recruits who took to the skies to wage war by night was a volunteer.
There were those whose fathers had fought in the First World War and who wanted to avoid the gruesome grind of trench warfare. There were others who were seduced by the glamorous modern image portrayed by the RAF, given added lustre by the glorious victory of ‘The Few’ in the Battle of Britain. For many, such as Ron Auckland from Portsmouth, who had experienced the damage wreaked by the Luftwaffe earlier in the war, there was an element of revenge.
Ron had witnessed the first German raid on the docks of his home town, where he worked as a civil servant. On duty as a fire officer, he had carried out the dead and rescued the injured after an enemy bomb fell down the air vent of a crowded air-raid shelter. During another, he and his family were bombed out of their home. That was enough; he signed up. ‘I’d seen a lot and knew just what the Germans could do. I was in a reserved occupation but I still wanted to join up. I wanted to be part of the war effort.’16